It turns out, if people in an online community really don't like what you're doing, they can turn to harassment, threats, or worse to try to shut you down.
If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright. If we apply the same thinking to ActivityPub, then most implementations of it are illegal. Fortunately, judges usually have enough common sense to step in and say a reasonable server admin would reasonably believe they have permission to do the things the popular software actually does.
On the other hand, if someone takes photos I’ve shared on Mastodon and sells prints of them or licenses them to a stock photo agency, they’re definitely violating my copyright, and I will sue them. Some of the other options like running ads on a server are a little more ambiguous.
Some of the other expectations people seem to have aren’t based on law but still-evolving concepts of consent. It would be nice to be able to program systems that have some awareness of what people are OK with.
If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright.
Unless the image is already copyrighted, it takes publishing to provide a claim of copyright. Is email publishing? What if it’s a listserv with 300 recipients?
In the 181 countries party to the Berne Convention, the image is copyrighted as soon as it is recorded to a physical medium. Yes, that includes a memory card, hard drive, etc…
It’s almost like those websites that say “when you upload your content we can do what we want with it” did that for a good reason: to avoid all this complexity and possible lawsuit.
If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright. If we apply the same thinking to ActivityPub, then most implementations of it are illegal. Fortunately, judges usually have enough common sense to step in and say a reasonable server admin would reasonably believe they have permission to do the things the popular software actually does.
On the other hand, if someone takes photos I’ve shared on Mastodon and sells prints of them or licenses them to a stock photo agency, they’re definitely violating my copyright, and I will sue them. Some of the other options like running ads on a server are a little more ambiguous.
Some of the other expectations people seem to have aren’t based on law but still-evolving concepts of consent. It would be nice to be able to program systems that have some awareness of what people are OK with.
Unless the image is already copyrighted, it takes publishing to provide a claim of copyright. Is email publishing? What if it’s a listserv with 300 recipients?
In the 181 countries party to the Berne Convention, the image is copyrighted as soon as it is recorded to a physical medium. Yes, that includes a memory card, hard drive, etc…
It’s almost like those websites that say “when you upload your content we can do what we want with it” did that for a good reason: to avoid all this complexity and possible lawsuit.